Cinémas hors circuits

LUX

LUX is an international arts agency for the support and promotion of artists’ moving image practice and the ideas that surround it. LUX exists to provide access to, and develop audiences for, artists' moving image work; to provide professional development support for artists working with the moving image; and to contribute to and develop discourse around practice.

Malcolm Le Grice is one of the central figures in British experimental film and video. He has been making work since the mid-1960s which has continued to be exhibited internationally, including recent screenings at both Tate Modern and Tate Britain. He is currently a professor at the University of the Arts London, and is the author of several books including Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (2001). You can read more about Malcolm Le Grice on LUX Online.

Peter Gidal's films have been an influence on several generations of artists. An important theorist and writer as well as a filmmaker since the late 1960s, Gidal was a pioneer of 'structural-materialist' film and his work has been shown around the world, including retrospectives at the ICA in London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. You can read more about Peter Gidal on LUX Online.

This DVD includes three seminal early films: KEY (1968), CLOUDS (1969), ROOM FILM (1973)

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Born in Donegal, Ireland, Vivienne Dick moved to New York in 1975. There she became part of a group of filmmakers affiliated to the music and aesthetics known as 'No Wave'. Shot mainly on Super-8, Dick's films from this period feature many people and musicians from the No Wave movement in New York, such as Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, James Chance and Ikue Mori. Invoking the spirit of '60s underground filmmakers, her work betrays an interest in individual transgression, urban street life, kitsch and pop culture. Multilayered and open-ended, the work is framed from a female perspective, with an overriding concern for social conditioning and sexual politics.

This DVD contains: GUERILLÃRE TALKS (1978), SHE HAD HER GUN ALL READY (1978), STATEN ISLAND (1978)

The Themersons had a significant influence on the art and philosophy of the avant-garde of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. Their work reflected something of the Dada and Constructivist forms and ideas of the time, but what most distinguished them throughout their lives, was their remarkable invention and technical experiment. This was true of every field they became involved in: photography, literature, art, design and publishing, as well as film. They were the most important makers of avant-garde film in pre-war Poland. After they settled in London in the early 1940s, they made two films under the auspices of the Polish Government in Exile including their first British film, Calling Mr Smith (1943), a rallying call to open the eyes and minds of the British public to Nazi atrocities in Europe. In London they became key figures in the post-war cultural scene, founding Gaberbocchus Press, a major small press publishing first English editions of Jarry, Adler, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Queneau amongst others as well as writing novels, poems, philosophical treaties, operas, painting and theatre design. They died in London in 1988.

OPTICAL SOUND FILMS collects the ongoing work and research of Guy Sherwin, one of the pre-eminent British film artists of the last 40 years in a unique artist’s book and DVD publication. Guy Sherwin studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s before becoming closely associated with the British avant garde film movement centred on The London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s. His film works, often including serial forms and live performance, are characterized by an enduring concern with time and light as the fundamentals of cinema. Optical Sound Films explores in detail one of his particular and recurrent concerns, the synaesthesic relationship between sound and image manifest in the material of film sound. These investigations take Sherwin from physical manipulation of the very material of film through to live performances utilising multiple film projectors, all of which are explicated through drawings, diagrams, video documentation as well the films themselves. This publication provides a unique insight into conceptual and practical concerns for artists’ working with film as well as a detailed exploration of the processes and technology involved in its production and exhibition.

Emily Richardson’s films explore landscapes and environments to reveal the way that activity, movement and light is inscribed in place. Traversing an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East End streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks and Cold War military facilities Richardson’s films offer a dazzling deconstruction of place and time. They focus the mind and eye to detail, finding transcendence and emotion in the everyday.

Richardson’s films are distributed by LUX and have been shown in galleries and at festivals internationally including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, NFT, Curzon Soho, Artist’s Space, New York and Edinburgh, London, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. A book of her work, Time Frames, is published by Stour Valley Arts, distributed by Cornerhouse, Manchester.

A pioneer of British video art, once described in Art Monthly as ‘the Henry Ford of independent video’ George Barber gained an international reputation with ‘Scratch Video’, an original fast-cutting, multi-layered rhythmic genre of work in the 1980s. Moving away from Scratch in the early 90’s, Barber created many low-tech video pieces and was influential in defining the then emergent ‘slacker’ aesthetic. Narrative is at the centre of much of his work, either deconstructing it, as in Scratch, or evolving a delivery and kind of milieu with humour and eclecticism that is very different to anything on television.

Margaret Tait was one of Britain's most unique and individual artist filmmakers. Over the course of 46 years she produced over 30 films including one feature, Blue Black Permanent (1992) and published five books of poetry and short stories, while living between the Island of Orkney and Edinburgh.

Margaret described her life's work as consisting of making film-poems. She often quoted Lorca's phrase of 'stalking the image' to define her philosophy and method, the idea that if you look at an object closely enough it will speak its nature.

This clarity of vision and purpose with an attention to simple commonplace subjects combined with a rare sense of inner rhythm and pattern give her films a transcendental quality, while still remaining firmly rooted within the everyday. Margaret once said of her films, with characteristic modesty, that they are born of 'of sheer wonder and astonishment at how much can be seen in any place that you choose...if you really look'.

LUX and Re:Voir are proud to announce the release of the DVD SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT, the first time that works from this defining period in British artists’ filmmaking have been made available on DVD or video. The 1960s and 1970s were groundbreaking decades in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organisation that incorporated a distribution agency, cinema space and film workshop. Within this unique laboratory, filmmakers were able to control every aspect of the creative process, and the physical production of a film – the printing and processing – became vital to its form and content. Many of the films made at the LFMC explored the physical nature of the film material, using production processes that shaped the form and content of the final works.